Teachers' Income

The source you cited made this claim.



You'll have to elaborate on what you specifically mean here, but usually this is presented in terms of eliminating teaching licenses and just letting anyone with a college degree attempt to be a teacher. However, this only makes sense if one believes that teacher education is worthless. We don't attempt to increase the talent pool of doctors or lawyers by lowering the barrier of entry because it is recognized that these jobs take specialized skills that one has to learn. There is a lot of specialized training that teachers get in their education. Is this all a bunch of useless crap? Such a system would seem to imply that it is.


I actually agree with you that it should be easier to fire teachers than it is. And the union is a problem in this respect. However, it is also important to recognize that the public education system is not a free market system. It is very politicized. I think the teacher unions have value as an organizing force that can protect teachers from the whims of the politicians who often attempt to make sudden and drastic changes to the entire system. Even with the unions in place, someone like Michele Rhee was able to come into DC and make seismic changes. If that happened very frequently, I tend to think attrition levels for teachers would be even higher.



Well, money for the unions comes from dues and political solicitations. And even if every teacher got to keep the money they paid for union dues, it would amount to a small raise. The actual public funding that is a problem is that which goes to very high salaries for a few administrative positions, the high costs of high volume standardized tests, training costs associated with constantly buying and implementing new curricula, and so on. Turnover in the political positions that govern educational policy is high, and it seems every time someone new comes in they want to use a different policy. And there are real costs to constantly switching policies.

I discussed merit pay because it is a major topic brought up by the current crop of education "reformers." However, if it doesn't actually improve schools, there's not much point to doing it.

honestly American schools need to be taught like Asian schools, where the class doesn't move on till the whole class understands the material.

double edged sword though, some people who do not understand the material simply do not want to understand it or in general just do not care about school. Part of that problem is solved with the testing system Asian schools have in place. However in the US we do not tend to have multiple schools per area of the same grade range to accommodate this.

Yeah that's true the school system needs to be reformed though.

This is very true indeed.

As a person who was constantly held back for others' apathy/inability, I hate this idea. I spent an entire year of chemistry balancing simple equations like NaCl -> Na+ + Cl- (salt getting dissolved) because the teacher had this philosophy. All people are not the same and should be taught to scale.

Well in this system you would be put in a class that is more up to your speed, you wouldn't be with people who get C's

My school was small. There were insufficient funds to have another class for just 6-8 people.

Yeah the school system would have to be overhauled. Then the Department of Education would be useful.

You're implying there was something wrong that my school was small. Why? My school was small because there wasn't a lot of kids. Hiring a teacher to teach 6-8 kids is something that no country does. Just cover the material decently, and those that don't get it haven't tried hard enough, then move on. It's not one kid's burden that another doesn't want to read his/her book or spend extra time on the material to understand it. There are even after school hours in most schools to help but no student goes, likely because they just don't care.

Now the whole country's I mean